FEBRUARY 26 - Today in Food History

• National Pistachio Day• National Personal Chefs Day (February 26 & July 16)• National Girl Scout Cookie Weekend: Girl Scouts of America (Feb 26-28, 2016)• National 30 Hour Famine (Feb 26-27 & April 29-30, 2016) Students in the U.S. and around the world unite to learn about hunger, raise funds to help the hungry, and then go hungry themselves for 30 hours!

On this day in:

1829 Levi Strauss was born. Inventor and manufacturer of jeans. He originally planned to make canvas tents for miners in the California gold rush, but soon found that durable pants sold better.

1846 William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody was born (died Jan 10, 1917) American frontiersman, buffalo hunter and Indian scout.

1852 John Harvey Kellogg was born. A surgeon, vegetarian and health food pioneer, while superintendent at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, he developed the first breakfast cereals for his patients, Granose (flaked wheat) and toasted corn flakes. His brother, William K. Kellogg founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Co. to produce cornflakes for sale to the public.

1857 Emile Coue was born. A French pharmacist, he was an advocate of autosuggestion. He suggested repeating the following sentence 15 to 20 times in the morning and evening: "Every day, and in every way, I am becoming better and better."

1895 Michael Joseph Owens of Toledo, Ohio patented an automatic glass blowing machine that could make multiple bottles at the same time. A big advance in bottle making. He founded the Owens Bottle Machine Co., and the Libbey-Owens Glass Company.

1903 Richard Jordan Gatling died. Before inventing the Gatling Gun, he developed a machine for sowing rice, wheat, and other grains, and invented a steam plow.

1908 At midnight (Feb 25/26), service through the Hudson & Manhattan railway tunnels opened to the public, carrying passengers between Manhattan and Hoboken New Jersey. It was the first railroad tunnel under a major river in the U.S.

1919 Grand Canyon National Park was established. 1,218,375 acres in the northwest corner of Arizona, it is18 miles across, and over two hundred miles long.

1928 Fats Domino (Antoine Domino) was born in New Orleans. One of rock-and-roll's earliest stars, one of his early hits was 'Blueberry Hill' which reached number 2 in 1956.

1929 Grand Teton National Park was established in Wyoming.

1942 The 14th Academy Awards were held at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, California. 'How Green Was My Valley' directed by John Ford won Best Picture.

1945 A wartime midnight curfew on nightclubs, bars and other places of entertainment goes into effect in the U.S.

1945 Bob Hite of the music group 'Canned Heat' was born.

2008 The Global Seed Vault ('doomsday seed vault') opened deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. It has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the world and shield them from man-made and natural disasters.

2008 All 7,100 Starbucks Coffee Shops in the U.S. close for three hours of employee training.